A. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to the deployment of equipment within a network, and more particularly, to an analysis of network equipment deployment relative to optimization factors including intra-nodal routing and post-processing heuristics.
B. Background of the Invention
The deployment of a cost-effective and fault tolerant network can often be a complex task. This deployment requires that the equipment cost and network performance should be properly balanced to find an appropriate solution for a network provider. As the number of nodes or sites within a network scales, the difficulty in finding this properly balanced solution becomes increasingly complex.
In building out a network, a network service provider may give an equipment manufacturer a number of different parameters and request that the manufacturer provide a cost estimate for the build-out. For example, the equipment manufacturer may be provided certain network demands including a topology of the network, a description of each of the relevant sites within the network, and the connectivity and bandwidth requirements between these sites. The equipment manufacturer is expected to processes these parameters and design a deployment that satisfies these parameters while maintaining use of equipment requirements by a network service provider.
Deployment solutions generated by different equipment manufacturers may significantly vary depending on the manner in which it was created and the factors that were considered. It is not uncommon to have different solutions that widely vary in the amount of equipment to be deployed as well as the configuration thereof. An equipment provider may lose a deployment bid if its deployment proposal is too expensive (i.e., the amount of equipment deployed is more than required to satisfy the network parameters) or the equipment configuration is not able to satisfy all of the demands.
One skilled in the art will recognize that oftentimes there is not a metric from which the accuracy of a proposed deployment may be approximated. In the case of a simple deployment, a network engineer may rely on past experience to judge the quality of a proposed deployment relative to the requirements of the network. However, as the size and/or complexity of the deployment increases, this off-the-cuff judgment oftentimes fails due to the sheer magnitude of analysis required to generate the proposal. An equipment provider may analyze a proposed deployment to ensure that the network parameters are met, but this proposed deployment is oftentimes not sufficiently analyzed to determine whether a more cost-effective deployment is available that still satisfies the network demands. Accordingly, an equipment manufacturer runs a risk of over-deploying equipment within a network solution to meet particular network parameters set forth by the network service provider.
Accordingly, what is desired are systems, devices and methods that address the above-described deficiencies within the prior-art network planning and equipment deployment solutions.